The Pendeba Society Visits Enba Village for Wetland Conservation

“Large areas of wetlands have been excavated for mud clods to build sheep pens, and it is extremely devastating to the wetlands and the ecosystem that depends on them. Alongside the river bank and lake, most of the corrals for keeping dzos, horses and sheep are made of sod. Using the sod for making corrals has two obvious disadvantages. Firstly, it destructs wetlands and grasslands by digging sod every year to construct/repair corrals and, secondly, it requires heavy drudgery for the herding community to construct and repaire the corrals every year,” said Tsering Norbu, Executive Director of The Pendeba Society, about how people build sheep pens in Enba Village of Tingri County. 

To better conserve the wetlands along Pengqu River that flows across Tingri County into Nepal, The Pendeba Society staff met with Mr. Sonam Tsering, Village Leader of Enba Village on July 17, 2011 to discuss about a conservation project of transforming the old sheep pens into ones that are more sustainable and endurable. 

The old sheep pens were built by laying earth clods one by one to form an enclosure. They are loosely laid together without any fortification measures. When there are heavy rains, these earth enclosures will break down and need to be rebuilt by excavated new clods from the wetlands again. It is extremely difficult for grass to recover in high-altitude areas, not to mention that the grass is even disrooted. Therefore, the harm to the wetlands from building sheep pens in this traditional way is continuous and irrevocable. 

We then discussed with the village leader Mr. Sonam Tsering about using fortified earth bricks to rebuild sheeppens instead of clods excavated from the wetland, which can better conserve around 100 hectares of wetlands for its lasting benefits to the village in terms of providing water sources, feed for livestock and high humidity of air.  Mr. Sonam Tsering agreed with us and promised to mobilize his community to implement this project together with The Pendeba Society. In the meantime, given the village still has no access to electricity up to now and has to use candles for lighting at nights, we therefore plan to help the village solve this lighting problem by purchasing and donating small solar photovoltaic lights to villagers. The whole projects in Enba Village will benefit more than 400 people and over 8000 sheep.